Paul B. Brown: I am one of the co-authors of Just Start: Take action; embrace uncertainity and create the future, as well as an extremely proud Forbes alum. A former writer and editor at Business Week, Inc. and Financial World, in addition to my six years at Forbes, I've also written, co-written and “ghosted” numerous best-sellers including Customers for Life (with Carl Sewell.) A long-time contributor to The New York Times, I am also a contributing editor to both The Conference Board Review (where I also write a column) and M.I.T.’s Sloan Management Review.
Len Schlesinger: I am president of Babson College, widely recognized as the world’s leading educational institution for entrepreneurship. I formerly served as vice chairman and chief operating officer of Limited Brands.
Charles Kiefer: I am President of Innovation Associates, Inc., a firm I founded the firm in 1976. Along with Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline. The IA staff pioneered the body of concepts and methods now called organizational learning that enable large organizations to innovate, and to change from being driven by circumstance and managed through compliance, to being characterized by aspiration and deep commitment.

Why Career Plans Are Dangerous

It’s usually an extremely silly question but lots of hiring managers still ask it.

You know most of the reasons why the question is so bad: It begs a lame joke (“When, Ms. Manager, do you think you will be moving on?”), or brown-nosing (“I hope to be well along my career within this fine company”) and it assumes that you are going to indeed like working at “this fine company” and that they are going to enjoy having you.

But there is a bigger reason the question is awful. It assumes the world is going to remain constant between now and then. That is never a good idea.

If five years ago you asked people who worked in mortgage banking, real estate, or journalism or at Blockbuster what they were expecting to be doing in 2012, we guarantee you the answer isn’t what they are doing now.

(“Let’s see, it’s 2007 and I’m an assistant manager of a Blockbuster store. The world is always going to want to make it a ‘Blockbuster night,’ so I am going to plan on being a regional manager. Yes, two promotions in five years. That feels right. So, that’s my plan.”)

So are we saying career planning is waste of time? Yes, much of the time it is, at least as it is typically taught.

Let’s deal with the exceptions first. If you want to work in an industry which is fairly predictable—say nursing — then plan away. The courses you need to take to gain an entry position are well known and so is the career path and the things you need to do to advance. So, simply figure out where you actually want to be in five years, and work backwards, just like all the career planning manuals tell you.

But increasingly, the world is not this predictable. And it is in settings of high uncertainty where traditional career planning is both a waste of time and potentially dangerous as all those Blockbuster managers learned the hard way. A career plan can lead you into a false sense of confidence, where you fail to see opportunities as they arise and or miss (or discount) major changes in the industry where you planning to succeed.

You need an alternative. Let us suggest one.

Instead of envisioning the perfect job and planning out the perfect path to get there, begin with a direction,based on a real desire, and complement that with a strategy to discover and create opportunities consistent with what you want you want to do.

In an uncertain world you can’t even come close to saying what a specific job might be, but you can say what’s valuable and important to you. Is it working in a specific industry? Managing people or not? Work-life balance? The answers will point you in productive directions.

So, the process looks like this:

Determine your desire

Take a step toward it

Incorporate what you learn from taking that step

Take another step

Learn from that one

Repeat until you have a job, your own business, or have achieved your goal.

How might this work?

You have an idea. “I want start my own business; I think I will start a public relations firm.”

Instead of borrowing huge amounts of money to rent space; hiring a staff; preparing marketing materials and the like, you simply start by trying to judge market reaction to your idea by talking to a few people who could become clients.

Once you do, you think about what they told you. (“Gee, no one seems to get overly excited about yet another p.r. firm, especially when the primary target of p.r. firms—the media—is in such flux.

“But everyone tells me they love the way I explain to their employees how the company’s p.r. strategy should work. Maybe, I should forget about p.r., which is about external communication, and concentrate on internal communication.”)

In other words, you don’t commit to a plan (starting a p.r. firm); you commit to a goal (in this case, “starting a business of my own that would be fun and successful.”)

It’s not career planning. It’s acting your way into a future you want.

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Instead of being dangerous, career plans are essential. Remember the old saying that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Of course planning in uncertain times is different than planning in stable times. And these days, anyone that thinks the future is going to be like the past is in for a terrible surprise. But, the answer is not to avoid planning. The right approach for planning under uncertainty is to have contingency plans and to re-look at your plans when you get new information.

Mr Bradt, thank you so much for the comment. I think we fundamentally differ…a fact that, I think, will make the folks at Forbes happy.

The problem with most contingency plans is they invariably are not that different that the original one. If I worked at Blockbuster, and my back up plan was to move to another brick-and-mortar video rental store if Blockbuster got into trouble, I still would be in terrible shape. That’s why I think it is more important to know what is important to you–I want to work in the service industry–and go from there.

But that is exactly what managers are asking when they bring up what a prospective hire sees him or herself doing in five years. They are less interested in commitment to that particular company than they are in commitment to the type of work. Workers who are invested in the type of work they do will stick out more rough patches and local employer-based problems than those who don’t believe that kind of work is important. They are also more likely to go with workplace culture or profession culture changes than those who are not committed, as long as they maintain belief that the changes are for the overall betterment of their customers/clients/etc. and not just their employers.

Now, let’s address a big error that you’ve made in this piece. You state: “If you want to work in an industry which is fairly predictable—say nursing — then plan away. ” Are you totally unaware that nursing is hardly a predictable career path these days? Do you know what has happened in health care over the last two decades that has resulted in the dramatic reduction of employed nurses? Are you aware that although both for-profit and not-for-profit nursing schools spit out new nursing grads in record numbers, the unemployment rate for those new grads is alarmingly high? Have you noticed that many newly minted Advance Practice nurses, qualified to work independent of physicians, cannot find positions for which they’ve been prepared? Do you know that the “ nursing shortage” in the United States does not really exist? Perhaps before you label an “industry” as “predictable” again, you should look into it first.

A couple of points. If your industry disappears it doesn’t matter if you are commmitted to the work within it. There won’t be work to be done.

As for your nursing comments, this is first time I have heard nurses can’t get jobs. In the Boston area, nurses who are willing to work 12-hour shifts Saturday and Sunday get the rest of the week off. I would love to learn more.

That’s the problem. When you go to college you are required to make choices and career plans using the best information. The information being provided is flawed. We are being told that we have a shortage of STEM’s (science, technology, engineering, math) but what American-born graduates in these areas are discovering is that American companies don’t want them at any level or any price. The largest employers are exporting jobs overseas and bringing internationals here on work visas, excluding American students of good quality. A grade point average of 3.5/4.0 is no longer good enough. But, trust me, 3.5/4.0 is darn good. It’s becoming common to see job listings that say they don’t want to hear from you unless you graduated in 2010 or later. For example, this one from IBM:

Then there are firms that hire engineers that do not see their principle business as technology, like banks, insurance, investment firms. These firms hire the lowest cost engineers they can find, not the smartest ones. That is why they are outsourcing as much of their technical positions as they can.

Finally, there are technical firms. They do look for smart engineers, but often times the managers there will still discriminate on the basis of age. And even the top technical firms are primarily hiring in low cost countries rather than here.

Smart engineers probably are in a much stronger than average position to find a job, particularly if they consider starting their own business as an alternative. That does not mean companies will hire them, it just helps their chances.

The best thing to plan for is who you want to be when you fail. Because eventual atrophy, attrition and failure are single most probably events in your lifetime. Never bet against failure. Prepare the inevitable climb out of the abyss.